A special gift for art

Nov 09 2007

Stephens House brings out hidden talents in challenged young adults.

Even on days when the deep fryer isn’t sizzling, Stephens House smells like doughnuts.

But Shelley Long defies anyone to call the young adults who visit and work at the facility just “sweet.”

“These folks are learning to create through their limitations, and that’s a challenge for any of us,” she said.

As program director for Stephens House, heart and home of the Bainbridge Island Special Needs Foundation, Long’s mission is to help developmentally disabled young adults build vocational skills in a community-oriented environment and in so doing, make a successful transition from school to adulthood.

The BISNF has been quietly going about its business – or businesses – at Stephens House since 2002. That’s when the doors opened on doughnuts, and Trepp Hanseth and other clients began making and packaging bite-sized bags of goodness for businesses and individuals, who could swing in during business hours, and fix a sweet tooth for $3 a dozen.

Long, at the time a para-educator with the Bainbridge Island School District, came to Stephens House to coordinate art projects. As the number of clients grew, and Long shifted to program director, she evaluated the young adults’ range of abilities and began looking for ways to expand their repertoire of activities, money-making and otherwise, in a way that would maximize the richness of their experiences.

After doughnuts came body care products, which provided both vocational and sensorial input, from developing scents – “Trepp loves to sniff, he’ll smell anything,” Long says – to mixing potions to applying labels to decorating the jar lids with dried flowers.

Other activities ran the gamut – putting labels on the Cafe Ometepe coffee bags, selling flowers grown in their summer garden, or making cards based on their own artwork.

“It’s just trying to find something to intrinsically add depth and meaning, and success,” Long said. “It’s based on need and ability.”

One of Long’s ongoing challenges, however, is that while the BISNF has established business partnerships with some venues around town – Winslow Way Cafe buys flower bouquets – visitors are rare.

And for the most part, the community remains unaware of just exactly what it is the organization is all about.

So late last month, Long took Stephens House public on a scale that it hadn’t gone before. At the Winslow Way Cafe, she single-handedly hung an art show called “Brilliance Revealed.”

The prints and original work created during the clients’ Tuesday afternoon art camps, which Long runs with BISD para-educator Sue Ericksen, contributed to the fund-raiser’s bottom line, estimated at $7,000-$8,000.

But for the young adults who work and spend their time at Stephens House, the process matters far more than the net.

Brilliance revealed

In the Stephens House living/work room, Long opens a drawer filled with original paintings made during the Tuesday art camps. The vibrant, dramatic collection of floral pieces largely represent group effort; others are by individuals.

Each were created over the course of several days through an adaptive approach to art instruction, through which she and Ericksen guide artists as they manipulate paint using blow pens, fingers, forks and marbles.

Long says she can’t begin to estimate what the organization might charge, were someone to walk in and ask to purchase a painting. And that’s not really the point.

At today’s art camp, Long begins with a warm-up “brain dance.” Looking every inch the hip art teacher in her black tights and mini and her chunky jewelry, she leads students in a series of high-energy movements to get their blood flowing, organize their minds and bodies and integrate the hemispheres of their brains.

The participants have a range of physical abilities, but Long insists that everyone try out a move in the spotlight.

“Just getting them out of the box and moving is hard, because they’re not that coordinated,” she said.

Warm-up complete, they get down to business. Each artist is equipped with a paper plate palette daubed with watercolor in hues of his or her choice. As Long blasts rock from the boom box, the artists dip their fingers into paint and drum them onto paper.

Jenny Mayfield’s quick application of primary vertical blocks comes to resemble the Italian flag. M’Rissa Curran’s impressionistic composition of pinks and greens brings to mind an English garden seen from above.

Heidi McDonald steadily taps dots of turquoise and purple onto her paper. The morning before, she’d sat in the same chair, quiet, still and a little reserved. Now, her smile is ear-spliting as she animatedly rocks and paints.

As some artists start to smear the paint, Long reminds them to use their fingertips to tap instead. She’s not asking them to employ this technique just to avoid painterly “mud.” Like the brain dance, tapping paint to the music integrates the mind and the body, creating a multi-sensory experience involving sight, sound and touch.

Earlier, at the Winslow Way Cafe, Long pointed out a series called “Art in Motion,” black-and-white and colored paper collages the artists made collectively, cutting out shapes and arranging them on paper while listening to jazz.

“Look at the shapes,” she says of one piece. “They’re very lofty, and a perfect representation of the music they’re listening to.”

She looks at other collages done while listening to world music and classical. While each piece shares the black-and-white template, the size, shape and arrangement of the cut-outs are completely different from piece to piece, each one a visual representation the music being played at the time, culminating in a dense, detailed and energetic splash of cut-outs arranged to raucous jump and jive.

“It got so crazy, we couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” she said.

Back at Stephens House, each artist has finished applying a base layer of watercolor. Matt Moeller, who earlier described himself as “a pink kind of guy,” places his painting inside a shallow cardboard box. Long then pops a paint-dipped marble inside it and, propelled into a hip-gyrating boogie, Moeller pivots the box to send the marble swirling over the watercolor.

Ericksen, who works within the functional academics arm of the Bainbridge Island School District, has gotten to know nearly all of the young adults in the room since they attended Bainbridge High School and says there’s no doubt that the work and community they partake in at Stephens House has helped them blossom.

“There’s evolution in every kid. Every one of them,” Ericksen said. “It may not be big to anyone else, but to them, it’s huge. Sometimes I think we have more fun than the kids do,” she adds. “We have a blast.”

In addition to the needed boost of awareness that Brilliance Revealed generated, Stephens House scored exposure from the Bainbridge Downtown Association, which selected the painting “Polar Bear” by Julian Wood and Ryan Walkowski for its 2007 Hollydays poster and brochure.

The best part for Long was that the judges didn’t realize the artists were Stephens House regulars.

“They’re excited about it, and they don’t even know it’s special needs,” Long said. “Because of this, we’re getting more people in. And I can’t stress enough how we survive with the support of our community. It’s crucial.”

This fall’s exposure and anticipation of holiday gift and card sales through programs like Christmas in the Country and the Alternative Gift Project have left Long optimistic but also hungry for more volunteers and even richer programming.

And although Stephens House’s mission remains vocational, Long says that her private wish, having witnessed countless Tuesday afternoon transformations, is to lead an art class every day.

She stands near McDonald’s shoulder and looks down at her turquoise creation.

“What say you?” Long says to McDonald, giving her a hug. “Is it gorgeous? It is.”